A talented pianist, flautist, and “integrative” psychotherapist, Michael Brant Demaria has blazed a trail into what he calls integrative psychotherapy, working as a life guide, soul guide, and therapist in tandem. Part of his Music for Emotional Healing series, Solace, from its very first notes of plaintive piano and angelic drones, flips the switch on the listener's introspective basement fuse box. Demaria knows how to reach deep inside and extract hidden feelings from inner chambers, finding stray light and stray darkness and bringing them together to even things out with just a few notes of flute or piano.

The first two tracks—"The Healing Heart" and "Twilight"—are rich with moody piano and drone work, but as the album flows the gradual addition of a repeating line of Native American flute signals the coming of something less wistful and more shamanic within the listener. Flashes of birdsong and minimalist piano encourage a sense of release, like clearing away tons of moving boxes that have been blocking the windows of the soul to finally let the light come blazing in through the third-eye skylight.

The final track "Asase Yaa" (a West African term meaning "Mother Earth") brings the listener out of their meditative reveries and back onto the ground with a bustling marimba and that restlessly soaring Native American flute now closing its gyre, wafting in and around the dancing drums. Taken together Solace offers an experience far more emotional than typical healing music. Dr. Michael Brant Demaria's experience in helping others through traumas and transitions is surely responsible for this unique approach. If listened to with an open heart, Solace can create a feeling of profound emotional drainage, the kind that usually only comes after an intense acupuncture or massage session. Demaria writes that his music is ideal for both of those practices as well as "whenever the world has become too much and you need to flow again." That's no mere statement and Solace is no mere album title: it soothes, heals, and brings the sun into even the rainiest of hearts.